Students
I work with students at UW on multimodal AI, world models, and visual navigation. The lists below introduce current students and research colleagues, former mentees, and students I mentored during high school.
Join the group: research opportunities and application guidance
Doctoral students
- Yifei Dong — World models for visual navigation.
- Fengyi Wu — World models and physical reasoning.
- Yiming Ni — Sign-language understanding; co-advised with Wei Cheng.
- Qifeng Wu — Efficient world models and multimodal inference.
- Tianyu Wang — Visiting doctoral researcher; Robotics Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech.
Master’s students & researchers
- Evo Lamont — Thesis research on online adaptation of embodied world models.
- Xisheng Chen — Thesis research on multi-view image super-resolution.
- Guangyu Chen — Capstone project on multi-view vision-language navigation.
- Xu Zhu — Capstone research on unified world models for visual navigation, in progress.
- Zihao Han — Research assistant, UW Allen School.
- Qiyu Hu — Research assistant, UW Civil & Environmental Engineering.
Undergraduate students
- Da Wei — Informatics, UW Information School; independent study and computer graphics.
Student research & recognition
- Yifei Dong — First author of LCVN (NeurIPS 2026 Oral), UniWM (ECCV 2026), and HA-VLN 2.0 (IROS 2026). UW Graduate School Top Scholar Award and Carwein–Andrews Ph.D. Fellowship (2025).
- Yiming Ni — First author of Sign-Language Datasets at Scale (ACL 2026), surveying resources, annotation standards, and evaluation protocols for sign-language research.
- Fengyi Wu — First author of GoViG (Findings of ACL 2026); coauthor of Hierarchical Speculative Decoding (ICLR 2026 Oral). UW Graduate School Top Scholar Award (2026).
- Conference support (2026) — Yifei Dong received the UW Graduate School Conference Presentation Award (ECCV), IEEE RAS Travel Support (IROS), and the UW Tacoma Council for Campus Engagement Conference and Training Fund award (IROS).
Former research mentees
Former students and research mentees from my work at UW and Carnegie Mellon, with subsequent academic and professional paths.
- Ting-Yao Hu — Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon; machine learning research at Apple.
- Yuxuan Zhou — Research assistant, Carnegie Mellon; doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute; ERNIE team at Baidu.
- Changdae Oh — Research assistant, Carnegie Mellon; Ph.D. study at UW–Madison.
- Hyesu Lim — Research assistant, Carnegie Mellon; Ph.D. study at KAIST AI.
- Charles LeWarne — Research assistant, UW; software engineer at AT&T.
- Siyao Li — Research assistant, Carnegie Mellon; applied scientist at Microsoft.
- Joshua Choi — Research assistant, Carnegie Mellon; senior data scientist at BNY.
- Yuran Wang — Research assistant, Carnegie Mellon; motion planning ML engineer at Tensor Auto.
- Johnny Garnica — Research assistant and bachelor’s degree at UW; master’s study at Northwestern.
- Sean Chang — Bachelor’s degree, Carnegie Mellon; software engineer at Google DeepMind.
- Aike Shi — Research assistant, Carnegie Mellon; bachelor’s degree at Georgia Tech; software engineer at Microsoft.
High-school research mentees
Students I mentored during high school, with science competition recognition and subsequent college admissions.
- Jasmine Liu — ISEF finalist; ACM Second Award and Fourth Award in Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Admitted to MIT.
- Yishu (Aimee) Yu — Third Place, Massachusetts Science & Engineering Fair. Admitted to MIT.
- Susan Wang — Yau Biology U.S. Regional Gold and Global Bronze; ISEF award. Admitted to MIT.
- Zejia Shao — First Prize, California science fair. Admitted to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
- Ziyan (Eric) Hua — Honorable Mention, Yau Computer Science Award. Admitted to the University of Chicago.
- Qiyuan Gu — Regional First Prize and Global Finalist, Yau Science Award. Admitted to the University of Chicago.
- Yusen Hu — Honorable Mention, Yau Computer Science Award. Admitted to Imperial College London.
- Yulun (Alan) Wu — Bronze Prize, Yau Computer Science Award. Admitted to Harvey Mudd College.
- Chiyu Zhou — Regional First Prize, Yau Computer Science Award. Admitted to Imperial College London.